The length of your roadmap is a function of how fast you are learning. An established product in a mature market may release new and improved versions one per year, and will have a correspondingly long roadmap. A start-up with new capabilities every week may have a roadmap of no more than a few months.

"To give everyone a voice and show them the world" - YouTube. "A high efficiency, low cost space travel vehicle that can carry passengers to Mars" - SpaceX. A product vision is a statement of the problem you're solving, or the change you want to see in the world.

"I prefer to keep roadmaps dates as vague as possible in order to maintain flexibility. If I don’t have sufficient confidence an item on the roadmap will be delivered by a specific date, then I don’t want to commit to it.

Wise Product people market their services around their organizations, as plenty of our coworkers don't know what we do. Product people are used to selling our ideas to sales and engineering, but UX can be a great connection as well.

There is the famous “two pizza rule” created by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: you have to be able to feed your entire team on two pizzas. If your teams are as hungry as mine, that’s like 6 people. One of the crucial elements of product culture is small crossfunctional teams.

“Always assume you may have to stop work at any time,” says Eric Reis, of the Lean Startup movement. It’s wise advice for a startup…or even an established company. Your resources may be diverted, and you never get to every possible feature. So you have to prioritize when setting up a roadmap, with the most important tasks done first where their value can be demonstrated.

This is one of my favorite product culture articles, written by my friend Jason Scherschligt. The article has tips on how to make this transition from a project to a product mindset. Plus there are a bunch of pithy take-aways that should become mantras for product people, like “celebrate rather than bemoan a change in requirements: it means you know more."

It's easier to discuss priorities and roadmap issues one-on-one with the head of sales, for example, than it is if the head of marketing is also in the room. Too many egos, too much politics. I make it a point to continuously "shuttle" between all my stakeholders gathering their input individually, discussing what's important to them, and trying out early versions of the plan on them en route to a final roadmap.

This week I've been thinking about quitting. I'm really good at it. I've left 3 jobs because of bad product culture. I wrote about one on LinkedIn a few months ago. It was that career experience that led me to the concept of product culture, and ultimately to ProductCulture.org and this nano-letter.

The product culture movement starts here. This group of passionate product people has inspired me and I need your help to codify our values, as in a Product Culture Manifesto. I think if we get this right we can help change the world.

"I don't like when people say that the product manager is the CEO of the product. To me, it's more like the quarterback. The quarterback sometimes has to call the plays himself, but also will take plays from the offensive coordinator or the head coach on the sidelines, right?" That's from my friend Dan Lack, who has been a CEO and a VP PM. We can go further: Quarterbacks are in charge on the field, but they operate within the overall team strategy developed by the owner and the head coach.

David Cancel, CEO of Drift, hates roadmaps. He says, "Either I'm going to disappoint you by giving you exactly what we thought six months ahead of time was the best solution when it's not, or by changing course and having lied to you."

But some customers are looking for "a paper promise." Rather than sharing an old-fashioned roadmap of features and dates, David and his product team communicate broad themes. Themes focus the team's efforts on high-level customer needs, problems, or jobs to be done.

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